Perhaps you’ve already heard about Artyom Saveliev, the Russian boy whose American adoptive mother decided that, because of her personal, non-medically-sought-out diagnosis that he had extensive psychological issues, the appropriate thing to do would be to shove the kid on a plane with a note pinned to his sweater or whatever and thus wash her hands of him. And then United Airlines somehow managed to let her do this.

I mean, really.

It’s funny because while my disdain for this is, I assume, evident, I’m half-afraid of the backlash from adoptive parents. Case in point: I was once talking to this other young economically-privileged white woman I know, and we got to talking about kids and stuff, and when I made the sort of standard, “Well, you could always adopt,” comment, I got a look of horror. Apparently a lot of the people she knows who have adopted have just this complaint about the children they cared for, that the kids are disturbed and they didnt know what they were getting into and now they’re stuck with it. (Because this exchange occured in Canada, some years ago, the main problem, she told me, is that only First Nations children tend to be available at the relevant ages. Which was a fucked up remark to make in and of itself.)

Caveat emptor: I am sure not all or even most adoptive parents are like this. And yet, go to any database full of potential adoptees either in the West or abroad and you will fnd their ranks filled with allegedly “imperfect” children of this kind. I know I am supposed to say that I understand that people can’t take on everything, that people shouldn’t be forced to care for children they don’t want. I certainly don’t want to shove any of these kids into a resentful household.

But sometimes the way people treat other people, even those to whom they have no family or other personal relationship, makes me sick.

My question, you see is this: what is our culture teaching people if they are consistently displaying the signs of believing that child rearing and child care is some kind of consumer lifestyle in which they will metaphorically purchase happiness by “selflessly” devoting themselves to a child? That the care of children is not viewed as a collective responsibility but rather an optional joy, and when it turns out that the experience isn’t joyful, that it’s too hard, you just, you know, go back to the store. Complain about the service you received. Call it a day. What happens or doesn’t happen to these kids when they are basically unwanted, no one talks about. That’s somebody else’s problem.

This manifests in more ways than clueless Tennessee women putting foreign children unaccompanied on planes. It manifests in the fact that foster care systems are often a disgrace, that school systems are a low funding priority, and that this country, for example, doesn’t have a functioning health care system to support people who do parent children of the non-Wheatabix-cereal-box-beauty commercial variety. These attitudes, I’m saying, have consequences. Generation after generation of these kids suffer both emotionally and materially from our habit of demanding certain habits from them, and no one really gives a shit. When was the last time you heard a politician get on his high horse about seriously reforming child services, and I mean, not in a “those social workers must be fired” kind of way, but in a “let’s have a conversation about whether this is the kind of society we want to be” way?

I spend a lot of time trying to direct my feminism from a place of understanding, because understanding and connection are, I’ve decided, what’s important to me. But that being said, I find it nigh impossible to understand this attitude we have about children, and the acceptable/unacceptable kinds, in this culture. And I find it really, really hard to sympathize with adoptive parents in these sorts of scenarios, as a result.

47 Responses to “(Russian) Children Now Subject to No-Fault Warranty, Apparently”

But sometimes the way people treat other people, even those to whom they have no family or other personal relationship, makes me sick.

This. I hate the way (some) people believe that anyone not related to them somehow deserves something like this. I know we all value our own family and friends more, but to devalue others to this extent… it’s like some kind of twisted narcissism.

Well said, Pilgrim. I’ve often thought that our society would be better off if children were raised in a collective manner, rather than treated as property for their parents/guardians to manipulate however they want (like the system on Anarres in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed). Impossible to implement? In this society, yes, but I’m a utopian so I’ll continue to dream.

In a more extreme example of shitty adoptive parents, I’m reminded of the NJ woman who starved and beat her adopted children while her “real” children were spared this kind of treatment.

We can’t (entirely) control what happens to our biological children psychologically either yet, for the most part, parents of emotionally troubled children do what they can to address the issue: hire a psychologists, have tests done, etc. There seems to be a fundamental difference in how some people view biological and adopted children and the expectations for adopted children seem to be almost impossibly high, as if people are making a deal with themselves: “If we go the adoption route, the child has to be “perfect” or else.”

PSoul, your point about viewing adopted children as a commodities is much more accurate than I’d realized. In fact, I’d never really thought about it that way. It’s profoundly disturbing.

The facts are still thin on the ground in this case, but I guess I DO have some sympathy with this woman (or couple; she’s married, why is she usually the only one mentioned?), partly because the culture has so little support for families with non-Wheatabix-cereal-box-beauty kids. I have also heard horror stories about Russian agencies lying to families to unload kids they know are animal torturers and pyromaniacs. Yes, the child is most likely a victim of institutional abuse, but it does him no good to place him with a family ill-equipped to help him.

I can’t understand why would-be adopters of older children don’t foster (with the intent to adopt). Many kids are legally available, and fostering makes it acceptable to “go back to the store” if a permanent placement doesn’t seem appropriate – and in the meantime, a child has been cared for in a home, albeit temporarily.

@Molly: I understand and respect what Jay is saying, and at the same time, I do find that this emphasis on understanding for adoptive parents continues to erase discussion of what happens to these kids once they become “too much” for a family. I’m not trying to hate on anyone for removing themselves from an untenable situation, but the interests in this discussion always seem to be framed from the adoptive parent’s perspective.

@Katharsis – I agree that people seem to be holding adopted kids to really high standards. Plenty of biological children are not perfect. They get bad grades, act out in school, have learning and physical disabilities, screw up, get in trouble as teens, etc etc. Yet a lot of parents love them anyway because…well, those are their kids. While I believe that there are a select few cases in which adoptive parents and children have been tragically mismatched, I really think that the techniques bio families use to resolve these problems – therapy, professional help etc – can help most adoptive families as well. Some bio families end up relinquishing children they can’t deal with – but it’s an absolute last resort. The standard shouldn’t be lower for adoptive kids. And sharing DNA does not flip a magic switch that makes you love and tolerate kids’ behavior more.

Disclaimer: my dad was adopted as an infant. According to him, it certainly did not stop my grandparents from straightening out his ass when he misbehaved, using the standard parental measures of the day.

@flackette: I completely agree. My family includes trans-national/trans-racial adoptees, and while some of those children had emotional/learning problems, they were handled exactly the same way as when those same problems cropped up in the biological children of the family.

It is unclear to me from the coverage I’ve read if the adoptive mother in this case even bothered to seek out professional help for her child. It doesn’t appear that she did. And her decision to put him unaccompanied on a very long international flight and have some random, internet-procured dude pick him up at the airport in Russia is sick, wrong, and nothing short of felony child endangerment. I don’t have any sympathy for her at all.

I think it comes from a place of misunderstanding what adoption really is, like you’ve said, Pilgrim Soul.

I think parents should view adoption as a way of healing the world, a way of engaging in something valuable where the parents can learn from the children, create reciprocal relationships, and provide a stable, nurturing environment.

The problem comes when parents treat adoption like they’re leasing the child with an option to buy. Like you said, children are not commodities.

Also, on a personal note… There is an adoption agency in my state that sponsors older children from Russia to come to the U.S. for a week in the hopes of matching these children with adoptive families. My parents participated in this program in 2005 and had a Russian child, V, come stay with them. They wanted very much to adopt him (they felt God was calling them to do so…). After *years* of jumping through hoops, filling out forms, and even traveling to Russia to visit V, the Russian government turned my parents down because my mom is on medication for depression. I know Russia has had some bad experiences in the past, but it was so frustrating for my parents that they were being denied when my mom had recognized her depression and sought help for it; she is completely stable. Yet if she had undiagnosed depression, they could’ve adopted without a problem. Now V is getting older and will be aged out of the system in three years. My parents, never ones to give up, are trying to see if they can sponsor him as an international student if he can come over here to study. Now, that might be much more difficult.

My point is that not only were the Tennessee woman’s actions harmful to her child, but they also have far-reaching consequences that affect thousands of other children.

@flackette: Yes! You articulated my thoughts better than I could in the moment.

I have no doubt that there are instances where adoption can have truly disastrous consequences, as can raising biological children. That said, however, being a parent is being a parent. All of the options for support and help are available for parents, no matter how the child came to be in the family. And you’re absolutely right that those systems of support generally are as effective for all situations.

A former colleague adopted a girl from China would was severely malnourished and received little to no physical contact as an infant in the orphanage. As a result, she was developmentally and speech delayed. This colleague went to the ends of the earth to get her daughter all the help and support she needed. That, to me, seems to be exactly what a parent would do for ANY child.

@bella: I think we can rule out putting an emotionally disturbed 7 year old on a plane by himself for 10 hours and having a stranger–who could be a fucking sex trafficker for all she knew–pick him up at the airport.

Yeah, you know, I’ve been reading around and someone I can’t find now said something like: we need to make a distinction between the act of putting the kid on a plane unaccompanied and the simple act of “disrupting” (this appears to be the correct term) the adoption. The latter may be defensible in many circumstances, but coupled with the former it’s pretty monstrous.

In an interesting age of the internet turn of events, the driver who picked the child up in Russia has blogged about it. See here, and here.

I agree about needing to make the distinction. I wouldn’t condemn her out of hand for disrupting an adoption. Sometimes that’s in both parties’ best interests (which is also sometimes the case when parents make their biological children wards of the state). What makes this case so heinous is that Ms. Hansen acted seemingly without any regard for the child’s well-being at all.

The limo driver’s version of the story sounds a bit disingenous to me—He suddenly has a blog? In English? Really? —but at least he followed through and had some concern for the kid’s safety. That’s more than we can say for his “mother.”

If we want to seriously reform our society as far as how we deal with “problem children” or children’s needs in general, then a lot more money has to be spent on education, foster care, social services, etc. as Pilgrim Soul said.

But other things would have to be done as well — such as not letting bio parents who fuck up have multiple chances to reform while their kids are in and out of foster care. Maybe if you expose your kid to drugs in utero, or abuse her, or let someone else abuse her, you shouldn’t get to keep her. Terminating parental rights is a serious thing, as it should be, but as the kids get older and older in foster care, they develop more and more problems (in general, not in every case), it can be harder to bond with them, and they become less “desirable” to adopt.

Yes, that might not have been the best option, but it is better than say, locking him in a closet for years. But if children are people, and some people are scary, then some children are scary. The parents took steps that someone would take if they feared for their safety, separating themselves from the threat. Is that what happened? I don’t know. All I am saying is, I can imagine a situation where I would feel that their actions were reasonable.

@Bellacoker: You are right. Some children are scary. So scary that you could fear for their safety or your own safety. In that case, you take them to an emergency room, not put them on a plane to Russia.

I think the blog in English makes sense only because if I were looking for a Russian dude to drive my adoptee to the ministry of education, I’d probably pick the first one with an english website that google turned up too.

@pedimd: Exactly! That’s the thing I think is conspicuously absent from this story. If the boy was exhibiting psychotic behavior, did she take him to a doctor? Did the school report such behavior? I assume he was in school, as he’s school-age–if he wasn’t, that’s another red flag. Did she consult any kind of child-welfare authorities for help with this allegedly violent, dangerous child? As you say, there are ways to do this, and systems in place to help parents and children in this bind.

I’ve heard many incredibly painful stories about parents who were forced to give up their children—adopted and biological—because they were too dangerous to themselves or others. But they all had exhausted every possible option before they did that. But unless there’s something that’s not being reported, it doesn’t seem like this woman—or her mother, who was involved in the situation—ever tried to get help.

@pedimd: That depends on what form the “scary” took. Is the ER appropriate for dropping the dog off the roof, or molesting the little sister, or putting ammonia in daddy’s coffee, or trying to burn down the shed? Or the second or third occurrence of the aforementioned?

@BeckySharper — This kid was like, 7, right? And had grown up in Russian institutions before he was adopted? That’s a set up for social and developmental delays, as well as attachment disorder. And, we don’t know why his bio parents gave him up in the first place — was he drug exposed/addicted? was he abused or neglected? More set ups for lots and lots of psychiatric problems. That’s definitely the case here in the U.S. and I think it’s worse over there. So I totally believe that he could have been violent and/or scary. (Although if he was, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the scary stuff would have been permanent.) But I agree with you that at this point there seems to be no evidence that the mom sought any help at all.

@ Harpity –Yes. The ER is appropriate for all of those things. Preferably an ER that has pediatric psychiatric crisis capabilities, but any ER in a pinch. A child who does any of those things needs psychiatric treatment ASAP.

@pedimd: Yes, it seems he was in a Russian orphanage for most of his young life, where he says he was physically abused. He could certainly have FAS or been born addicted to drugs or Maude knows what. Russian orphanages are notorious for their neglected, abused, sick children.

So when his adoptive mother claimed she had absolutely no idea when she adopted him that he might have psychological problems and that she totally believed the Russian orphanage doctor who said, “He’s fine. He’s healthy.” I though she was either incredibly naive or really fucking stupid.

@BeckySharper: Or she’s lying?? or had selective hearing? Where was her adoption agency in all this? Aren’t they supposed to warn the adoptive parents that some kids might have problems, and advise about how to handle it?

@pedimd: Yes, those are equally possible reasons. The adoption agency has been conspicuously quiet during the media firestorm. I can’t imagine that they didn’t warn her about the risks associated with adopting an older child, to say nothing of an older child from a Russian orphanage. Any reputable adoption agency would. On the other hand, any reputable adoption agency would vet the hell out of a potential parent, too….

Harpity, I’m getting the sense that you feel we’re being hard on the adoptive parent here? I mean, I’m not saying that the child might not have legitimately had issues, even extreme disturbance. My issue is that to the extent we’re stopping at, “this kid was just too hard to raise,” we need to push further. There is this notion that adoption is some benevolent “love him and he’ll be okay” process that I don’t think benefits either adoptees or adoptive parents much; that’s my issue.

Americans who adopt from Russian orphanages often do so specifically because they want a white child. There are orphanages in other countries whose children are—compared to Russia’s— younger, less likely to have been born with FAS or addicted to drugs, less likely to have been neglected, abused or malnourished. And that’s to say nothing of the many non-white children they could adopt in the US.

I certainly know more than one couple who has chosen a more difficult, riskier Russian adoption over a Chinese or Vietnamese adoption simply because they did not want to adopt a child of a different race.

I think this speaks to PSoul’s original point about some people’s attitudes toward adoption being a mutation of the Western consumer lifestyle. Some prospective parents place a high value on external appearance.

I think that is a good point, Becky. To take it one step further, when people adopt children who are a different race they know that cultural differences come along with the package. If one were to adopt a white Russian baby, it would be easier to not take into account the fact that white people are not culturally identical. The adjustment between life in Russia and life in America would be just as jarring and difficult for the child as the transition between life in Vietnam and life in America.

If the child was violent and scary, as the mother states, it is very likely that those actions were advantageous in his past situation, and if he is going back to a similar situation, it’s probably good that those coping strategies are still in place.

I know, Bella, I keep thinking about what will become of that poor kid now that he’s presumably headed back to the same abusive, neglectful warehouse of an orphanage that he came from.

I also think you make a good point about people not taking into account cultural differences. I also feel that with a lot of white American parents, they simply expect—maybe not even consciously—that because the kid is white and looks like them, that s/he won’t have serious problems, because our culture perceives non-white people as being the ones who are troubled, violent, etc.

As an adoptee, I think the adoption industry has a lot to answer for. People who adopt often pay a lot of money for their purchase and they’re looking for customer satisfaction. Not that such adoptions can’t or don’t work out; there’s evidence that they can. But it’s the system itself that perpetuates the idea that children are a commodity to be bought, sold and traded.

Adoption is like the ultimate privatization of a public responsibility. The industry even has its own lobby, if there was any doubt.

IMO, adoptions should be rare, and should require the informed consent of the child in question. People desperate to raise other people’s children can’t seriously be expected to make decisions based on what’s best for the kid. Until the human-rights and civil-rights issues of adoptees are meaningfully addressed, it’s “whatever the market will bear.”

Found this interesting blog and couldn’t help writing. I have been following this case in both Russian and English language media, trying to understand what actually happened. This boy apparently only spent 1 year in the orphanage. Until he was 6 years old, he lived with an alcoholic mother who neglected him and often “forgot” him at her drinking buddies places. One can only imagine what sort of things this boy could have been subjected to during his early life. When the orphanage said he was healthy, they probably meant “healthy for an orphanage child who was neglected the first 6 years of his life”. My personal opinion is that this boy exibited behaviors of the reactive attachment disorder, once he felt more or less at home with Hansens and learned a bit of English. If one reads about the attachemnt disorder and compares to the things that Hansens claimed he was doing/saying, it fits quite well : threats, anger, fascination with fire, etc. Perhaps he also has fetal alcohol syndrome as well, although he does not seem to have overt facial features. Provided that Torry Hansen has a Masters degree in Nursing, it is incredible that she dis not recognize it, or was not prepared for it, or thought she was but really was not, and on top of that did not seek help!

What really strikes me is that the whole return was apparently orchestrated by the grandmother, not Torry Hansen. It was the grandmother who contacted a lawyer in early March (there was an interview with that lawyer in Russian newspapers) asking about legal options to return the child.It was also she who bought the ticket (hastily, as one can see from the Moscow guide’s testimonial – she became so afraid that could not wait for the dissolution paperwork), found the guide in Moscow and put the child on the plane. Finally, she and not Torry talked to the media. Of course it was Torry who signed the letter, so she obviously did not object to the plan, but I think it was the mother who was the driving force. And here is why, in my opinion: Torry worked (at a VA hospital), was not married, the boy was home schooled, and the grandmother lived next door. Who was spending most time with the boy? I think it was the grandmother. Torry Hansen may have been the adoptive parent on paper, but in reality it was Nancy Hansen. And she does not have a degree in nursing and is not prepared to take the crap from this boy, attachment disorder or no attachment disorder.

With regards to the role of the adoption agency: they posted a Q&A on their website trying to address some of the accusations and basically implying that they did not do anything wrong in this case (without addressing and specifics due to confidentiality and lack of information). One of the things they address is single parent households, which they believe are a perfectly good choice for adoption, as there are many success stories, etc. But in this case I think it was not a good choice, or at least they should have recognized during the preparation phase that the grandmother was going to play a vital role and prepare her accordingly and not only the daughter. And homeschooling was probably not a good idea either. These children need a lot of structure in their life, and being at home all day long can make even a healthy child become bored and chaotic (I certainly see that with my children).

The case made headlines in the Russian media, and there are already local families wanting to adopt the boy, but Torry is still his mother from the legal point of view, and she went into hiding and cannot be reached from signing the paperwork to “annul” the adoption. I think both women are not very smart, Masters degree or not.

There is this notion that adoption is some benevolent “love him and he’ll be okay” process that I don’t think benefits either adoptees or adoptive parents much; that’s my issue.

Well, I think there’s an incredibly powerful cultural narrative about how love is all you need, ever. Which is nonsense. Sometimes, you need love, psychotherapy, medical treatment, and an army of people providing social services. It happens to people who are parenting their biological children, adopted children, and foster children. Sometimes you really do need all of those other things, and it’s damn hard, and some people do give up. (Remember the father in Nebraska who surrendered his NINE children under the state’s safe haven law?)

My own professional background is in bioethics, and I think you see this kind of commoditization in fertility medicine as well. The bouncing bundle of joy is a marketing tool. After about three years, I had a terrible time dealing with even academic studies of fertility medicine because it seemed like it was all hope, prayer, excitement, joy, BABIES! Never any talk about difficult pregnancies, abortion, or actual parenting, just an unrelenting focus on biological process.

@Jones: IMO, adoptions should be rare, and should require the informed consent of the child in question. People desperate to raise other people’s children can’t seriously be expected to make decisions based on what’s best for the kid.

Give me a fucking break. You obviously have a personal ax to grind, and you’re willing to be a total asshole while you do it. Your blanket characterization of parents of adopted children as “desperate” people who can’t possible care for any child who’s not genetically theirs is incredibly offensive—it’s purely nasty, judgmental and mean-spirited. It also sounds like you’re saying only biological parents are capable of being good parents; a two minute trip to your local family court will blow that assertion out of the water.

On the practical side of things, you also don’t make much sense either.

Since the vast majority of adopted children are adopted as babies or when very young, how exactly do you propose to get their informed consent?

And if you think only informed-consent-giving adults should be adopted, who do you think should raise children given up by their parents? Orphanages and foster care?

@Russian woman: Thanks for that comment–that’s way more concrete information than I’ve read in most news coverage of this story!

Lots of interesting discussion, and I’m glad, since mose of the media coverage I’ve seen seems to focus on the sensationalistic ‘how COULD she!?’ elements, rather than on the more substantive questions – what resources *do* we have in place for adoptive and bio parents dealing with these kinds of issues? What preparation did the adoption agency provide for the Hansens, and is it an accepted standard? Dissolution is *not* a return-kid-to-the-store process; was this dissolution being handled strangely? Thankfully this is NOT a common situation, but what safety nets do we have to help keep it uncommon?

Not only is the consumer culture mindset a huge problem with some international adoptions, I think that the cultural narratives of ‘love is all you need’ and ‘families take care of their own’ combine dangerously in IA. People feel that all they need to do is have enough love, then all will be well. When that doesn’t happen, they feel that they need to handle everything on their own. When *that* doesn’t happen, you can end up with clusterfucks like this one, and people feeling like ‘oh, we’re not really a family because we can’t make it work.’ The long process of making it work is what makes a family – the vast majority of bio and adoptive families know this, but I think adoptive families can have a really hard time if they’re not prepared for problems with bonding.

And I cannot agree more about how much racism is involved in IA, but I hadn’t thought about how people will ignore the cultural transition issues with a white European kid that they’d pay attention to in an Asian kid.

Maybe if you expose your kid to drugs in utero, or abuse her, or let someone else abuse her, you shouldn’t get to keep her.

I’m really not ok with this, especially the idea that we should automatically seize children born to women who use drugs during pregnancy (and what drugs would those be? An occasional glass of wine? Coffee? Or just the ones that more disadvantaged women tend to use?) Strengthening social services and making them more accessible to more people makes sense, so that these families can get help; punishing women and children who are already in difficult circumstances by tearing apart their families and sending children into a generally insufficient system really does not help anyone.

There are certainly times when children should be separated from their parents, but it really shouldn’t automatically be a first-and-forever step.

@Pilgrim Soul: The issue may not be “this kid was just too hard to raise” but “this kid was just too hard FOR THAT FAMILY to raise”.

For whatever reasons. Which at this point, the rest of us know little about.

The mother may have felt that the child would be better off trying for another chance with a different, better-suited family. Which hopefully will be what happens.

To repeat, NO it’s not okay that she shoved him on a plane. But maybe what the local child welfare agency told her was the equivalent of “tough luck, he’s your problem now”, and that was her desperate, irrational response.

Mostly though, I’d rather postpone the tar-and-feathering until the facts are in.

Wow. Just, umm, wow. This discussion is heartbreaking. Like this case has any more to do with adoption than the so-called octomom has to do with biological parenting. Do we have any reason to believe that there is a larger trend of adoptive parents trying to return their kids for refunds?

Swing by your local group home, folks. I doubt you will find many out-of-control youth signed over to the care of the state by adoptive families.

It breaks my heart when I think of the children who have to go through all of this, and I truly appreciate your rant. I’m working toward my MSW in hopes to work in the adoption/foster care field (eventually with North Korean refugee children), and I hope to bring the kind of reform we need. Thank you so much for your passion on this issue. It means a lot to me.

And maybe I have an axe to grind, but so what. Adoptees are entitled to their axes, they earned ‘em like everyone else. The commodification of children is very real and exists in varying degrees across the adoption and fertility spectrum.

As I see it, informed consent in this context wouldn’t be limited to adults. Domestically, group homes and supportive foster care are two alternative solutions until consent is given. Children in divorce custody cases oftentimes are asked which parent they want to live with. Why is it ridiculous that children without current parents should be extended the same opportunity to weigh in on such a profound decision?

It’s disheartening when the experiences and perspectives of adoptees are so summarily dismissed, especially when they don’t conform to the “grateful” stereotype. That in itself is revealing.

occhiblu: excellent points.

Getting back to the story, thank you russian woman living abroad for the additional info. And thank you harpyness for writing about it. Interesting discussion.

Jones, what I especially took issue with is your characterization of adoptive parents as:

“People desperate to raise other people’s children can’t seriously be expected to make decisions based on what’s best for the kid.”

I’m sorry that you had a bad experience, and I want to be sensitive to that…yes, if you have an axe to grind, you’re entitled to it.

But to take your bad experience and act as though it gives you the right to smear every parent out there who has loved and raised “other people’s children” as their own…that’s just low. And WRONG. Four members of my own family are adopted and to hear you describe their parents that way offends me deeply.